[xxxi] 



Browns vermischte botanische Schriften, providing this with a good 

 index which refers unfortunately to an added pagination different from 

 that of the original. It was also reprinted in Oken's Isis 1819: 801 — 984. 



The only contemporary review is an anonymous one in the Monthly 

 Magazine 29: 516 (June 1810), quoted at length by Britten (1922) and 

 attributed to Samuel Frederick Gray, undoubtedly a competent and 

 well-informed critic. The reviewer began by remarking that 'in no 

 book since the publication of Jussieu's Genera Plantarum is there dis- 

 played such a fund of botanical knowledge as this'. He praised Brown's 

 adoption of a natural system and then gave an explanation of the 

 missing 144 pages mentioned above: 'The author promises to give the 

 diagnosis of his orders, which at present are to be gathered from the 

 full descriptions prefixed to each, and also contracted generic charac- 

 ters arranged after the Linnean system, with the next volume, but which 

 are, together with the Acotyledones, to precede the present one. This 

 circumstance explains the reason of the volume beginning at page 145 

 appearing, at first sight, as if nine sheets of letterpress had been omitted 

 or misplaced.' 



Brown's originality receives due mention: 'We should be giving a 

 very false idea of this Flora of New Holland were we to leave it to be 

 understood, that in following Jussieu, Mr. Brown has been contented 

 with copying the characters of the orders, or of such genera as are to 

 be found there, for his work. On the contrary, everything here is new; 

 Mr. Brown's descriptions of the orders are new, the descriptions of the 

 genera and species are likewise his own, and every part abounds with 

 observations equally original and useful; nor are these, by any means, 

 confined to the plants of New Holland, but numbers of them are appli- 

 cable to botanical science in general.' The view expressed by Martius 

 and Carruthers that Brown withdrew the Prodromus from sale on 

 account of a reviewer's criticism of his Latinity has been shown by 

 Britten (1907, 1922) to be unfounded. 



The public reception of Ferdinand Bauer's companion work, Illu- 

 strationes Florae Novae Hollandiae (1813), was equally disappointing, 

 and after the issue of the third part Bauer abandoned his enterprise of 

 publishing exquisitely engraved and meticulously accurate hand-colour- 

 ed illustrations of the new genera and species founded by Brown in the 

 Prodromus. The fifteen plates portray 1, Johnsonia lupulina; 2, Pterosty- 

 lis grandiflora; 3, Banksia coccinea; 4, Chloanthes stoechadis; 5, Styli- 

 dium violaceum; 6, Aneilema crispata; 7, Cartonema spicatum; 8, Chilo- 



